


This Time Of Madness, Part 1: Gwen

by Criccieth



Series: This Time of Madness [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Eventual Fix-It, M/M, Other, Series 03 Fix-It: Children of Earth (Torchwood)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Criccieth/pseuds/Criccieth
Summary: After Children of Earth, Gwen must deal with her own grief even as she has to carry on.
Relationships: Ancelyn ap Gwalchmai/Winifred Bambera, Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Series: This Time of Madness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643965
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28





	This Time Of Madness, Part 1: Gwen

**Author's Note:**

> This was written after CoE, as part of an attempt (which sadly never got off the ground) to create a fan-made Season Four, with the starting point being "Ianto is dead, how does he return?". It was posted on my Livejournal - I've made a few tiny differences before posting here. It was canon-compliant as canon stood at the time. This was intended to be the first of three parts - the second being Jack's POV and the third being Ianto himself. I'm finally planning on trying to write the other two parts. It IS a fix-it eventually but this part is entirely CoE-compliant.
> 
> Ancelyn ap Gwalchmai and Brigadier Winnifred Banberra were characters in the Seventh Doctor story "Battlefield", during which they fell in love. His full name and title come from the novelisation of that story. Regarding names - in the UK 'Jack' has often been used as a 'alternative' form of John. In Wales, Ianto is an alternative form of 'Ieaun', which is the Welsh for 'John'
> 
> "Proper tamping" is a Swansea phrase and basically means furious.

  
This Time of Madness

Part One: Gwen

The day the world was going to end and didn’t, Gwen starts trying to get answers. When the kids stop screaming, the soldiers panic and shout until their commanding officers manage to get some sort of information from above. Orders, not answers, but it means that they know the threat is over. The 456 are gone.

She can’t raise….( _don’t think that!_ ) she can’t get hold of Jack. His phone rings and rings and keeps cutting to voicemail.

She punches in every other number she can think of – all the different Government and Whitehall bureaucrats she bypassed in favour of Frobisher just three days ago, but every single line taunts her with its mechanical _brrrp-brrrp_. She tries all the Torchwood contact numbers Jack’s ever given her with similar results. And then, so desperate to get in touch with someone that her mind has shut down to no more than _pleasepleaseplease_ , she rings Ianto’s number.

It rings maybe three times and then there’s a click and she hears his voice. And for one second, one single **second** , she thinks…..

Standing there in Rhiannon’s kitchen she freezes and listens, transfixed. He sounds relaxed. Cheerful.

“Hey, Jack, if it’s you, try again in five minutes. Gwen, if it’s you, try Jack’s number. If he doesn’t answer….umm…try again in about half an hour?” She can hear the smirk in his voice and she remembers that night she came across them in the hothouse…

And she starts to cry. Because she’s never going to hear his voice again. She’s never going to roll her eyes or giggle at one of those dry, sarcastic quips again. She’s never again going to see him walking up from the Archives, tugging his jacket straight and adjusting his tie after Jack had been down there to ‘retrieve’ something. She’s never again going to swear at him for making her jump out of her skin by appearing behind her, speaking before she knows he’s there. Never again going to have coffee placed by her hand just at the moment that she realises she could do with a cup. Never again going to look up and see him watching a momentarily oblivious Jack, his heart in his eyes until he realises she’s looking at him. She’s never again going to glance into the office on her way to ask Jack something and see them in there: Jack sitting at his desk with Ianto standing over him, suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up and waistcoat hanging open, one hand resting on Jack’s shoulder while he points to something in the pages before them. She’ll never again watch in silence while Jack reaches up and puts one hand on top of Ianto’s and squeezes gently, or while he sips from a glass of whisky before holding it up for Ianto to take and drink automatically from the exact spot Jack had.

Whenever she stumbled into their private moments like that, she used to creep quietly down the stairs and then noisily re-mount them. She’ll never do that again. Never go into the Hub and make noise to avoid catching them in the act again.

She crumbles into Rhys’ arms and cries and cries. On the other side of the room, Rhiannon sobs in her own husband’s arms, all her earlier anger gone.

There’s a party on the Cromwell Estate that night, but no one from their house joins in.

There are no parties the next day. The Government tries to keep it all quiet of course, but with the threat of having their children snatched now gone, a lot of people are suddenly talking. And Frobisher, it turns out, kept meticulous notes – all now in the hands of his devoted second.

It takes five days for the UK Government to fall. Apparently, it only takes three for the French to pull down theirs, and it takes a week for the US to follow suit but she doesn’t find that out until later. Because those five days are a tumult of riots that make what happened on Cromwell look like a bunch of mates having a laugh. The dead are numbered in thousands. In China, where the Government hangs on longer than any other, the dead are in the tens of the thousands. Months later the global estimate is well past 1 million as every single Government either runs or is dragged kicking and screaming from power.

By the second of those five days, she’s flown past desperate right to borderline hysteria, haphazardly concealed by an outward calm, because she still has no idea where Jack is. She has a better idea where Johnny got the car he offers her, but she only says ‘thanks’ and takes Rhys and Andy and goes back to Ashton Down.

That’s when she starts to get some answers. And when she starts to wish she hadn’t.

Stephen. Alice. Names she’s never heard before but Johnson, now even more grim-faced, shows her the files and then lets her see the recording. She can’t watch it all the way through.

When she sees the security feed that shows Jack walking out of the building after his silent confrontation with Alice, she asks to see the other woman but Alice has gone. Her house remains empty of life, her bank accounts still and silent. Gwen wonders whether Jack’s ever told Alice of the infinite black that is death ( _something moving in the dark_ ) but she can’t shake off the suspicion that Alice has gone into that darkness herself, either to join her son or try and escape from his absence.

The next day she finally gets somewhere. The summons is to the Palace and when the big silent car arrives she feels a flood of relief at seeing Lois sitting in the back seat. Johnson’s admitted to leaving the young woman behind when she broke Jack out, and the chaos going on around them every day has been such that even with Andy’s help she hasn’t been able to find out what happened to Lois. Up until the phone call telling her to await the car, the name Torchwood has been closing doors, not opening them.

When they arrive at the Palace, the smooth-faced man who comes to meet them tries to detach Rhys and Andy but Gwen point-blank refuses. The four of them are left standing silently in a huge room with massive oil paintings on the walls and carpets so thick you could lose your shoes. After a few minutes the young man comes back.

“If you could all come this way - ladies, sirs?” The soft Scottish accent would sound pleasant normally but Jack’s voice seems to whisper in her ears, talking about sexy vowels and she wants to cry. Again. Like after Tosh and Owen, she’s got to the point where she’s exhausted by her own tears. But it hurts, every minute of each day, and telling herself Jack has the right to mourn in his own way doesn’t help because though Rhys liked Ianto well enough, he doesn’t ( _didn’t….oh God, **didn’t**_ ) know him like she did and with Jack gone she has no one to share her grief with.

* * *

Rhiannon’s voice, scathing in its tearful contempt, dismissing her as not knowing him at all. Rhiannon, exhausted by hours of weeping, sitting beside her in the tiny living room, her voice drained as she explains. Useless fucking male pride, she calls it, that made Morgan Jones keep insisting he would be a master tailor again one day, when he got the money together to rent another shop. Providence Park wasn’t on the NHS and the shop they grew up in went because of bills that still needed paying even after their mother’s suicide. She talks of the years on the estate, their father’s slow descent into depression and alcoholism and death. Her brother dropping off the radar and the only sign of his continued existence being the weekly envelopes containing cash and the single piece of paper with his name on it. The money is a bank account, Rhiannon whispers, so his nephew and niece might have more options than their parents ever did.

* * *

She’s been expecting to see some sort of lackey and as they walk along corridors and up flights of stairs she wracks her brain to remember everything she’s ever heard about the mechanics of the Torchwood Institute. Queen Victoria apparently handed the running of it over to some lord or other but some time during the reign of Edward (or was it George? She never can keep the order of succession straight) it got handed over to civil servants. Then Harriet Jones had found out about them and the Prime Minister’s office somehow wrested more and more financial and tactical control. One of Gwen’s first memories of Ianto is of him trying to field calls from the PM despite the fact that Saxon wouldn’t talk to anyone but Captain Harkness and Jack flat-out refused to take calls from anyone who was trying to tell him how to do his job. After he came back from his time away, Jack was even less inclined to listen to anything from a politician.

So when they step through a final door and she sees that face looking calmly at her from across the room, she stops dead. The Coopers are Welsh to the bone – no English monarchy for them, thank you very much (Gwen’s dad is just about prepared to admit that Henry Tudor had a Welsh claim but that was over 500 years ago), so come 3p.m. Christmas Day the telly always got very firmly switched to anything but BBC1. But even so, there’s no mistaking that face, nor the clipped, formal tone.

Two hours later and as they leave the palace, they’re all stunned into silence. No more political interference, a renewed and amended Crown Charter. The Queen was clearly quietly furious with both her own Government and UNIT. The result is unlimited funds to rebuild and staff Torchwood Cardiff, now to be called Torchwood Prime. Yeah, they’re not just going to deal with the Rift - they’re going to oversee everything. Because she’s also expanding Torchwood Two, up in Scotland, which deals with its own weird and wonderful things. And now there are to be two separate, new branches of Torchwood: Torchwood Three will now be the name for the London office (and she wonders what Ianto would make of that… _this is Torchwood. This is home._ ), which will deal with any small-scale alien incursion in England; and Torchwood Albion, which will be the Queen’s own taskforce for any large-scale alien threat. UNIT, apparently, will still be consulted on any threat to the world, but the rights UNIT assumed after Canary Wharf, when they took over much of what Torchwood One had done, are to be taken back. And she wonders what Ianto would make of **that**. She doesn’t quite know why the Daleks were Jack’s particular bugbear, though she has a sneaking suspicion Ianto knew. But she does know why Hell, for Ianto, was metal figures and fire-wreathed corridors. They all practically lived in each others pockets after Owen and Tosh and she knows he had nightmares right to the end. Not every night but often enough that for her, like for them, ‘Canary Wharf’ stopped being a place and became a tangible thing.

They close down his small, neat, flat. There are only four photos in the whole place, all in silver frames. The one of Ianto with his sister and her family – not a professional photo but clearly a posed shot at some family gathering - she gives to Rhiannon. The one of the team, taken by Rhys as they stood on the far side of the water tower from the lift, she puts on her own desk. The one of Ianto and Lisa, arms round each other in what she thinks is Trafalgar Square, she stares at for a long moment before she packs away. It’s the only image she has ever seen of the woman herself, as she must have been. The fourth is Jack and Ianto, standing out on the Plas. They aren’t looking at the camera, aren’t even, she doesn’t think, aware there’s anyone else there because they are looking into each other’s eyes as Jack speaks, his hand on Ianto's arm and the smile on each face….

Rhys holds her again, lets her cry into his shoulder. The photo goes into the top drawer of her desk.

They find his will, neatly filed with his sparse personal papers. The body of it must be years old because it gives almost everything to Lisa, while his death-in-service payment goes to his sister. Then a codicil, dated after Suzie’s second death – everything now to Rhiannon, save for the stopwatch. That is for Jack, and she cries once more.

Time passes in a haze. She tries Jack’s phone every day but after a while it simply stops ringing. By then she has access once more to Torchwood’s systems; the actual thinking, working part of Mainframe is buried so far underground that even that bloody bomb could do nothing to damage it. That Myfanwy was caught in the blast she regrets far more than the fact that the cryogenics bank was damaged, apparently beyond repair. She checks the remote readings for Grey’s capsule seven times and the ones for Susie’s five before she signs the order that will allow the capsules to be destroyed, contents and all, as soon as they’re dug out of the rubble. She also decides that with Jack AWOL and the Queen having made her de facto leader, she can choose what rules and regulations to follow. Her orders are firm: when they finally get down that far, Tosh is to be given a decent burial. She also has special orders for Drawer 71 and when it is opened, she calls on Martha for help. The cybernetics are removed and returned to the drawer and she contacts a local crematorium to deal with what remains. She is the only attendant. A week later, she finally manages to get Ianto’s body released. She cannot face the funeral home, cannot bear the thought of looking at that still face again, but Lois goes for her and takes the small urn with its ashes to place at his side. At the funeral she keeps looking around and afterwards she checks the CCTV tapes for hours – but there is no sign of Jack and now her grief is coalescing into anger.

She digs as much as she can and realises with a wrenching sense of loss that she is nowhere near as good as Ianto was at this. She does find information about hidden bank accounts so she watches them, but there is nothing; Jack has taken himself off every single radar she can think of. She has no idea how he can be hiding from the scans she’s running on country-wide CCTV, but then with the riots still sporadically raging in almost every city she supposes any number of cameras are being destroyed and not replaced.

The riots are a backdrop, nothing more. When the Government admitted defeat, acknowledged that it couldn’t even hold on for an election, the Queen decided to invoke powers that only ever existed on paper and now they’re approaching the end of the thirty days she’s been ruling the country in practise as well as theory. Every political party is scrambling to get voters on their side for the forthcoming election, but it’s nothing more than a meaningless distraction as far as Gwen is concerned right now. With the Crown more firmly behind Torchwood then it has been in years, the clearance of the Hub and the selection of new premises and staff elsewhere gathers pace.

Ianto told her once that there were twenty-seven survivors of the Battle of Canary Wharf. She never dared ask him if he included Lisa in that count. Whether he did or not, the number is now ( _oh god oh god oh god oh **god**_ ) down to just 12, and five of those are in mental hospitals. It doesn’t take her long to reject the idea of employing any of the others. She signed Andy’s and Rhys’s and Lois’s paperwork without any discussion – that they are all three in this for the long haul is known without words.

She’s not in the field now, of course. Andy recommends a dozen of their former colleagues and there appears a list of recommended names from someone called Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. When she looks him up, she realises she can trust him.

The list includes the names Winifred Banberra and Ancelyn ap Gwalchmai. Banberra reminds her a little of Johnson, who she hasn’t even considered for a Torchwood post, although it's clear Banberra actually thinks for herself instead of simply following orders. Ancelyn is not what she expected but he has his own undeniable charm. Throughout the three weeks the newcomers spend learning the streets of Cardiff, she keeps expecting to hear Jack flirting with one or both and being met with a mean punch from Banberra or an offer of a duel from Ancelyn. Ianto, of course, would just have ignored it.

* * *

After France manage their Grand Slam, hours after Wales trashed Italy, the two of them got hammered and sat on the Plas; her with an ice-cream and Ianto with his umpteenth bottle – he’d drunk at least four since she stopped, having lost count somewhere around their eighth pint. Not to mention the shot chasers he’d been slamming back while waiting for her to finish each pint. She asked him if the flirting and sleeping around bothered him.

“Now if he didn’t flirt, he’d not be Jack,” he’d slurred.

“So how about the….ah….you know?” she asked. He’d stared at her blearily for several quizzical seconds before he cottoned on; when Ianto got hammered he got well and truly wasted.

“No”, he managed, but once he started shaking his head it was clearly difficult to stop it. “No, no, no, no no.” He reached up and clutched at his head, presumably wishing the world would stop spinning.

“No what?” she asked.

He gave her a soft, happy smile. “Doesn’t do it.” The smile faded and she saw pain in his eyes. “He used to. Back before…..” He looked away and she asked before her drunken brain could figure it might not be a good idea.

“Before what? Before he went away?”

“No,” he said and looked back at her with a grimace. “Before Lisa.” Her surprise must have shown on her face because he frowned. “You knew, didn’t you?” The frown twisted into something dark. “I had to distract him. Stop him wondering why I never left the Hub. If he went off to some rooftop I knew we were safe, knew he’d find someone else, but if he stayed inside he’d always get bored and come looking for me sooner or later. Easier to go to him, then I knew he wouldn’t wander around and find her.” He closed his eyes, tilted his head back as a soft rain began to fall. “Afterwards, he told me I’d missed my calling. Said I’d have been a fair conman. And that I was already a hell of a whore.” She stared at him in sheer horror as she remembered his return from suspension and Owen making comments, purposefully loud, to the effect that getting shagged by the boss clearly had benefits other than just the physical. No wonder Ianto had gone white every time. At the end of the first week of it, she and Tosh had ganged up on Owen and threatened to make his life a misery unless he stopped. Jack hadn’t said a word.

She must have made some sort of noise because his eyes opened and he looked at her, and for a moment his face carried the same aching world-weariness that Jack's did when he thought no one was watching, making Ianto look defeated, older for an instant.

“What else would you call it?” He didn’t wait for her to say anything to that. “But after the faeries, he….he needed someone to talk to. After the Beacons, so did I. It was…different. After Suzie went, it changed again. Not just…sex. It was….more.” He looked at her. “And then he left, and when he came back – He flirts, but that’s it now.” He blinked a few times and a sudden frown appeared on his face. “Do you think that makes us a couple?”

* * *

She certainly thought it did, but she had never got around to answering his question because just then his phone went off and Jack was calling them back to work. They attempted to downplay their inebriation but when Jack saw how drunk they were he gave them some god-awful green stuff from his desk drawer that had them both stone-cold sober in thirty seconds. Which hurts like hell, by the way. But she thought of them as a couple.

She remembers how scared she was when Rhys came with them to the factory, and how much she worried about him while Gray was ripping Cardiff to shreds around their ears. She remembers how when the whole team went into the field, Jack always teamed Ianto up with one of the others and so she suggests to Banberra and Ancelyn that they shouldn’t work together. That gets her a blank look from Banberra while Ancelyn calmly tells her he has sworn on the honour of his name that he will always defend his lady. Which earns him a glare from Banberra but the message is received and understood: Andy or Rhys or any of the other slowly growing number of field agents might work with them but Lord and Lady Garde-Joyeuse come as a matched pair. Of course, no one calls Banberra by her title, or least not more than once – it only takes the one murderous glare for their self-preservation skills to kick in. Ancelyn is the only one who gets away with that.

She seems to spend half her time being driven from London to Cardiff and back these days. And not perched on top of a lorryload of King Edwards either. Now she sits in the lap of luxury in the back of a Bentley and has video conferences on the go before she arrives at the rapidly growing new office block down in London, or the makeshift setup they’ve got in Cardiff. At first the clean-up looked like it would be easy but then they found some deep-lying structural damage so the whole Hub is being rebuilt. Again. Only this time it needs a lot more work doing to it and with the increase in numbers comes a need for more workspace. So now Lois is working her way through what Gwen can’t stop herself from thinking of as Ianto’s archives to move them. She’s admitted she’s impressed with the level of organisation. Everything is cross-referenced, tagged and flagged and it’s only a matter of days before Lois knows her way around the referencing system. With all the coming and going, it doesn’t take long before Lois is as possessive of the files and artefacts down there as Ianto used to be.

Lois never blinks when Gwen calls her Ianto without thinking. And Gwen never does it without hiding away and crying.

The 20 week scan, coming almost four months after they lost him, confirms she is having a boy. She sits with Rhys that night and they talk names. Her parents argue for ‘John’, the name they had ready for the son they never had, but that version of the name carries memories she doesn’t want. But unbeknown to themselves, her parents have given her an idea and so after a bit of a chat, they settle for Ieuan Owen Williams, because Jack Ianto Owen seems a bit of a mouthful to foist on a kid. This way, Gwen feels that she will be able to hold to something of all three men. She starts hoping, even then, for a daughter ‘next time’, because Tosh Martha Williams will be a good name.

One of the last things they find when they’re clearing what was once the main floor of the Hub is the leather wrist strap. It’s in the middle of the medical bay floor, still….being worn, as it were. She wonders, not for the first time, how Jack’s resurrections actually work. She’s seen him come back from being shot, from having his throat ripped out, from being gutted, from falling, from drowning. She’s also watched the first part of the tapes from what happened at Ashton Down and she’s made herself read the report. All they could find to take there was one arm, which is still in storage there, and a torso with a partial head. It’s the latter that….came back. Grew back, and that thought could probably bring her to vomiting even without the almost permanent queasy stomach the pregnancy seems to be giving her.

She uses her newfound authority to have the arm brought back to the Hub where she destroys it and the other one both. She has no doubt that some bright spark somewhere will think to try and use it to replicate Jack’s inability to die if it’s left in military hands too long. And she’s seen enough of the pain his condition caused everyone around him to wish that curse on anyone.

* * *

One time, back before Owen died the first time, just before the whole thing with the box of Lucifers, they had a bad week. Every one of them was walking-wounded by day five and Jack had died several times. On the seventh day of non-stop chaos, a Dakosian came through the Rift right near a school. From the point of view of the Dakosian, this was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Tosh was out for the count after a run-in with a Restion the day before (look like Tribbles, temper like Darth Vader and a bite like a Weevil), so Owen stayed in the Hub and ran comms and she and the others went out together.

They took it down but they got split up in doing so and it got Jack alone for maybe thirty seconds before Ianto got to them. She knew how bad it made her feel to hear Jack getting ripped apart but Ianto was close enough to see it happen. She tried to get to them straight away but the headmistress hadn’t gone into the hall with the rest of the school and so they had a civilian issue. It was normally the sort of problem Ianto dealt with but even as she managed to stop the other woman from running screaming into the street, she heard Ianto in her earpiece giving the all-clear in a rigid voice before taking himself off comms. It took nearly a quarter of an hour to calm the woman down enough to get her to drink the retcon laced water and then feed her instructions for all the school about terrorist-threat drills. By the time she’d finished she was proper tamping, ready to clobber Ianto for taking time out to cop it off with Jack and not come and help her. She rounded the corner to where she’d seen Jack fall – and froze. Ianto knelt on the freezing concrete, oblivious to the congealing mess around him, cradling Jack in his arms. A Jack who was still all too grey and immobile.

As she stared, wide-eyed and fighting not to panic, she could hear Ianto speaking, his voice a cracked shadow of its normal smooth sound. One arm was wrapped tightly around Jack’s shoulders and the other hand kept running through Jack’s hair and down his face.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Didn’t get here in time. I’m sorry, I know you hate dying alone. See, this is what happens when you keep taking stupid risks. Two minutes, that’s all it took when that Weevil got you last week. Now we’re on what, a dozen deaths in 7 days? I hate this, did I mention? Bloody fucking hate this. Hate sitting here, waiting for you to come back. Hate watching you die.” The sound he makes is somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “Come on, Jack. Come back, yeah? Come back to me. You’re starting to freak me out here…..” This time, it **is** a sob and he drops his head and draws Jack closer, surrounding the dead body with his own.

She’s seen Jack die more times than she ever likes to think about and she’s seen him gasp his way back to life so often she’s lost count, but suddenly she realises that none of them, not her or Tosh or Owen, have ever stopped to wonder how Ianto feels about it. Owen certainly has become somewhat blasé about it – not that he puts Jack at risk for the hell of it but sometimes it’s become a case of ‘whoops, we lost Jack. Hang on a sec, he’ll be right back’, almost as though his death is on a level with him getting called away during a conversation. Now, standing in the shadows and watching Ianto watching Jack, she can see that it’s nothing like so simple for Ianto.

She starts forward, unsure of what to do because after all, Jack **will** be back, even if this rapid succession of deaths is meaning it’s taking him longer to come back than usual. Then there is the familiar rattling gasp and Jack jerks back into life. From here, she can see his gaze go instantly up and to the side to exactly where Ianto is, and at the same moment his hands automatically lift to clasp the arms that encircle him. And she realises how often she sees that – sees Jack come back looking for Ianto, how he hangs on to Ianto while he re-orientates himself.

* * *

The last time she saw that was when Clem shot Jack. The next time after that, when Jack came back, it wasn’t in Ianto’s arms but next to Ianto’s dead body.

Six months to the day and the new Hub is up and running. Torchwood Prime is open for business. And that’s when her mobile rings, and when she looks at the caller ID and sees ‘Jack’ her heart seems to stop in her chest.

END


End file.
